Forward Deployed Engineer, Huntress

• Ownership and agency. You will lead efforts on your own, being the single responsible person. This has to be the operating mode that enables your most successful work
• Systems first thinking. This is non-negotiable. When you encounter a new problem, you instinctively map the system: actors, flows, dependencies, feedback loops, failure modes. You don't build a feature; you understand the system it lives in, then build the right intervention. You can look at an organization-wide workflow and see where a single leverage point could change everything
• Founded or led a business that required you to build the product AND acquire the customers. Not "I was employee #5 at a startup." You've been the person who had to understand the customer problem, build the solution, sell it, support it, and decide what to build next—all with constrained resources. You know what it feels like when there's no one else to hand it to. This experience is what gives you the judgment to operate autonomously in an innovation role
• Prioritizes outcomes over tooling. You understand that AI is a powerful lever, but not a universal one. You distinguish between where an LLM adds unique value and where traditional automation is more reliable. By analyzing departmental bottlenecks, you design and deploy the specific interventions—whether agents or custom tools—that drive outsized gains for the entire team
• Strong, full-stack engineering experience. Ruby on Rails experience is highly preferred. Golang is a bonus. But more than any specific language, you can drop into an unfamiliar codebase, understand its patterns, and ship production-quality code. You read existing code before writing new code
• Delivers in stages and transitions cleanly. You naturally decompose work into chunks that prove value incrementally. When a project succeeds, you hand it off with enough context that the new owners can run with it—and you move on to the next thing without looking back
• Communicating across audiences without losing fidelity. You can pair with a detection engineer on pipeline architecture in the morning, demo a prototype to a sales leader at lunch, and pitch an innovation project to executives in the afternoon. You don't dumb things down; you reframe
• Opinions about operational reliability. You build things that you can prove are working. Feedback loops, health checks, and validation are part of how you build, not afterthoughts
• Thriving in ambiguity. No backlog. No sprint planning. You figure out what the highest-leverage thing to build is, make the case, and go. If you need someone to tell you what to work on, this isn't the right fit
• Not afraid to fail. Everyone says it, we mean it. We expect some of our efforts to fail, not because they’re impossible but because they are truly audacious. To be innovative, we have to push the limits of what is possible

Desirable

• The Innovation team exists to transform how Huntress operates: delivering tangible, outsized business outcomes by reducing toil and increasing speed across the company
• As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll identify high-leverage opportunities, build working solutions fast, prove their value, drive adoption and training, and transition successful solutions to permanent owners. Then you'll do it again
• This is not a product engineering role with a backlog
• You'll embed with teams across the company—engineering, sales, security operations, support—to understand their pain, prototype solutions, and ship things that change how they work
• You'll operate with extreme autonomy in ambiguous problem spaces, and you'll be measured on business outcomes, not story points
• You act as a strategic catalyst, identifying the specific technical levers that will drive the highest return on operational efficiency
• You look for patterns across the organization where a scalable solution can eliminate a category of toil
• Whether you’re deploying an LLM-based triage system or a streamlined data pipeline, your focus is on creating a force multiplier effect: creating high-impact systems that empower teams to achieve outsized gains with their existing headcount
• Identify, pitch, and execute innovation projects that deliver measurable business impact; from concept through working prototype, through transition to permanent ownership
• Embed with teams across the organization to understand workflows, diagnose bottlenecks, and build solutions that reduce toil and increase speed
• Design and build full-stack solutions in a production codebase, integrating with existing infrastructure and data pipelines
• Map complex systems end-to-end before building—understand how data flows, where failures happen, and what the second-order effects of a change will be
• Create the playbooks, self-service documentation, and internal demos that enable teams to successfully adopt new workflows at scale
• Transition successful projects to their permanent owners with the context and documentation needed for long-term maintenance
• Gather signal directly from customers, partners, and internal stakeholders to inform what to build next
• Prototype rapidly, validate with real users, and kill projects that aren't working
• Reports to: Head of Innovation